The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

But Soho was something of an anomaly in the otherwise prosperous West End of the city: an island of working poverty and foul-smelling industry surrounded by the opulent townhouses of Mayfair and Kensington. This economic discontinuity is still encoded in the physical layout of the streets around Soho. The western border of the neighborhood is defined by the wide avenue of Regent Street, with its gleaming white commercial façades. West of Regent Street you enter the tony enclave of Mayfair, posh to this day. But somehow the nonstop traffic and bustle of Regent Street is almost imperceptible from the smaller lanes and alleys of western Soho, largely because there are very few conduits that open directly onto Regent Street.